Diane plays guitar. She plays it well. When the guitarist of sensational
local rock group, Split Horizon, goes solo, she sees her opportunity to
play in a band. The band.

What follows is the terrifying truth behind rock music gigs: vicious rivalry, alcohol-fueled rages, and open drug abuse.

Nicknamed
Valor, Diane must learn new ways to overcome the overbearing Killer-B,
lead singer of Split Horizon, and hateful misogynist and serial abuser.

A gripping drama, Rise of Valor demonstrates that having great talent is not enough in the turbulent world of rock.

You need great strength.

About the Author

Mark Taylor's debut novel crash landed on planet earth in 2013.
Its dark brooding style benchmarked his writing and has led to further
releases of novel and short story collection alike.

While most of Mark's work is macabre, occasion has it that he will write about kittens and daisies. Just not very often.

Some say he is a product of his environment, others, a product of his own imagination.

Whichever
it is he works happily, portraying dark existences on this planet and
others. He relays his fears and doubts on his characters, so always has a
smile. If Mark is real, as some say he is, you might find him in
England.

My name is David Duane Kummer. I'm a teenager, with a couple published novels and a collection of short stories.

I live in a small, river-town on the Ohio River in southern Indiana. Along with taking care of younger siblings (I have eight total), I make time for writing in between school and sports.

I've been writing since I was young, with As Trees Turned Away being my first published work and She being my first published novel. Along with writing, I am an avid reader and watcher of all things horror, and enjoy writing reviews on them for others who might want to know my opinion on them.

When I'm not writing, I enjoy talking with my hilarious friends and amazing girlfriend, spending time with my loving family, watching movies, and working out to burn all of the calories I get from binge-eating Hawaiian Rolls. Those things are really addicting, am I right? I'd rather get payed in those than money.

A.) Well, when I was in early elementary school I already loved writing. By third grade, I'd had a copy of one of my "books" (actually a novella) printed professionally ten times, but it was never on sale. I had a brief hiatus from writing, then returned in May of 2015 to publish with Kindle Direct Publishing.

At first, I had no plans to make any money. I just thought it was cool. But with time I realized that you could legitimately make money off of this author thing. That's when the wheels started clicking and I hope to one day make a living off of writing books. (Funnily enough, since this realization sales have gone down. Fate is cruel.)

So, to answer your question, I got serious about June of 2015.

2.) What is the hardest part for you about writing?

A.) The hardest part right now is not getting discouraged when sales don't go how you had hoped. It's tough work, putting all those emotions and long nights into a book, only to have it not sell well. If I had to give advice to an indie author, it would certainly be: Don't get discouraged. Keep fighting.

The actual writing/book/words part, though, is leaving my characters behind. It's not the same with short stories, but even my novella My Abigail, which was only 20k words made me sad to leave behind those characters. It was especially tough with She, probably because of how that one ended.

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Synopsis:

They have grown strong in the shadows, the kingdom of Oldon. The land is void of hope and of strength against them. The human kingdoms grow corrupt everyday, so that the lines between good and evil are slurred.

One young man from a small village in the valley could change all of that. He fights with the passion of a warrior and the luck of a magician. And when the barbarians force him out of his home, the journey begins.

Trained by a knight, shadowed with secrets, and against the kingdom he once called home, Jonathan is an outcast, a rebel. But more than anything, he is a leader.

Enden is a world filled with wars, famine, sieges, torture, and death. But the greatest battle of all is to survive. Only one thing is certain. Something is rising, in the distance near the edge of the world where forgotten secrets brew. Something has risen. And it is coming.

It is coming.

3.) How did you feel upon publication of your first completed project?

A.) When I published my first book officially in 2015 (see above), I was thrilled. Amazed. We immediately ordered 10 copies, and I set to work writing a full-length novel soon afterwards. Every time I publish something, it's a rush of adrenaline that keeps me going for weeks afterwards. There's nothing like it.

4.) What is more important to you, story, or character? Why?

A.) Character is, by far, more important to me. The story is what they do. Without them, there would be no story. They are the cause to the story's effect.

I strive to make my characters as familiar as possible, especially for myself. I want readers to relate to them. I pour myself into every one of them and try to entertain. Without them, I wouldn't have anything published.

5.) What is a typical day like in your world?

A.) Well, if we're going by weekdays, it's normally wake up for school (yeah, I still got that; I'm only in high school), go to either basketball or cross country practice afterwards depending on the season, and then come home and shower. I'll either work out or practice more, or I'll bypass that step and go straight to the computer. I'll stay on there until 11 or 12, read for maybe an hour, then go to bed and repeat the whole thing over again at 7 the next morning.(Is that healthy? Probably not. That's why there are mangoes.)

While writing the first book of the Dreadland Chronicles, coming of age in a post apocalyptic world, I was confronted with a small dilemma. Most of my fiction takes place around where I live, in Western Maryland, an area I’m intimately familiar with. Though sometimes I run across a place that surprises me right in my own back yard.

In All Roads Lead to Terror, book one in the Dreadland Chronicles my main character Meat, and his three closest friends, Window, Einstein, and Billie-Bob travel to Richmond Virginia to rescues a group of young children who had been taken by a savage band of survivors.

I’ve been through Richmond several times, and when I was driving a truck I’ve delivered several loads to different businesses in that city. But I didn’t have the intimate knowledge needed to create a realistic setting for my characters. Realism in my fiction is very important to me, I believe it’s imperative that the reader feel like they’re actually at the location I describe. With that in mind I use real world settings as backdrops for my characters.

Faced with this dilemma I turned to Google Earth. The program contains a little gem called street view, where one can go down to street level and view 360 degree photographs of the actual street and buildings that lined it. That was how I learned Chef Mamusu’s Africanne Café was located across the street from an Enterprise rental store. The café was a small place, the main entrance right on the corner. A drive thru bank had been built directly behind the café with the entrance on one street and the exit on the street that ran perpendicular to it.

Something else happened while I was researching their path through Richmond. Two blocks down the street from that corner café stood a nondescript row of buildings. One in particular had been painted white. Above the single glass door the word hope had been written in black paint. Around it that same sentiment was repeated in a multitude of different languages.

It’s gone now. I’ve gone back to look, and the wall of the building that was once white has been repainted a drab brown. But when you stop and think about it, it’s strange really that given my mindset as I worked on the first book in the series, struggling to get the story just right. It’s important, at least to me, that the story be right. Hovering on the verge of just giving up and working on something else, that I should run across a message like that.

It was a message that not only gave me the desire to continue the series, but also offered up the answer every writer struggles to uncover as we write. The underlying theme that transforms the story from simply words on the page to a living thing that breaths with a life of its own. That message of hope has become the cornerstone of the foundation that the Dreadland Chronicles rests upon. Hope is what these four boys offer in a dangerous, post apocalyptic world.

All Roads Lead to Terror

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Synopsis:

On the day of his birth the dead walked and society crumbled. His mother
took one look at him and pronounced him Meat. He survived, she didn't.

Fourteen
years have passed and obscurity means survival in an increasingly
dangerous world. For the survivors compound at Bremo Bluff that
obscurity is threatened when a savage band abducts a group of children
from the compound.

Accompanied by his three friends Window,
Einstein, and Billie-Bob, Meat embarks on a quest to rescue the
children. A journey that will lead them into adulthood, with a brief
detour through the Dreadlands, as they confront the harsh reality of a
brutal world beyond the barriers that had served to protect them.

In
the dead city of Richmond, Meat and his friends will confront a savage
cult of children who worship a creature of the night. These creatures,
once considered the nightmare imaginings of a fevered mind, are now
awake in a world where the population that once served as their food
source has been severely reduced.

Desiree has been writing since before she could talk. Or at least, that’s how it seems. As a child, she’d spend her weekends making books. She’d scribble anything that came to mind on notebook paper and then staple all the pages together. Before she knew it, she had a stack of books.

The original self-publishing.

In junior high, she graduated to writing terribly melodramatic novels in tattered composition notebooks. These books were a hit with her classmates, and they would spend more time passing around and reading the newest installments that they would spend actually paying attention in class.

Since then, she’d had short stories published in anthologies such as Lust Chronicles and The Mile High Club and her musings have appeared in publications like The Huffington Post and The Frisky.

While her early writing was mostly centered on naughty things, she’s since entered the dark and twisted world of the thriller. White Rabbit is her first novel.

When she’s not writing or reading comic books, she picking apart the storylines of her favorite TV dramas and movies.

And when she’s not doing that, she’s usually whipping up something scrumptious in the kitchen. She’s a rabid foodie who’s accustomed to receiving marriage proposals after having made someone, man or woman, a meal.

And when she’s not doing any of the above, she’s traveling. She loves her hometown of Brooklyn, New York but feels the need to get away three or four times a year, especially to the Caribbean where her family is originally from.

Harrison Ford was her very first celebrity crush, and she still loves him to this day.

She’s never met a whiskey she didn’t like.

She can recite the lines to the movie Annie, backward and forward.

She never backs down from a Scrabble challenge and once scored 75 points with the word clitoris.

Her prized possession is an official Star Wars replica lightsaber...in green, of course.

She’s a huge fan of professional wrestling and still watches WWE twice a week, religiously. She asks that you not judge her for this.

I've been writing all my life, but I'd say I only got serious about it two or three years ago. I resolved the finish the novel I'd been playing around with for years. But when I did finish it, I didn't think it was good enough, and so I went back to the drawing board for a few more passes. Then I hired an editor and finally published the thing. I'm currently working on the sequel.

2.) What is the hardest part for you about writing?

Focusing on one idea though to completion. I get shiny object syndrome quite a bit.

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Synopsis:

Would you do the one thing you promised to never do again to save someone you love?

Logan Alexander is in exile.

It's a self-inflicted exile but an exile nonetheless.

As the most gifted hacker on the east coast, he’s made a few bad friends and even more of the worst kind of enemies.

A routine job takes a wrong turn, and the aftermath, Logan goes into hiding. With a terrible tragedy eating at him, he makes a vow never to repeat history. If he can just manage to stay away, to disappear for good, then no one else will ever get hurt because of him.

Or so he thinks.

One phone call is all it takes to change that. To change everything. Forever.

One phone call brings the ghosts from his past, the ones he’s been desperately running from, front and center. One phone call thrusts him back into a world he swore to leave behind. One phone call forces him back to the home he can’t bear to return to. One phone call presents him with an impossible job, and puts his family, what’s left of them anyway, in the gravest danger possible.

Logan tries to make things right, tries to prevent all hell from breaking loose, but it seems he’s doomed to take two steps backward for every step he takes forward.

Did he really think it would be so easy?

Silly rabbit...

Spies and betrayals at every turn. No allies, no one to turn to. And the person he trusts least of all is himself.

Out of options, he plays his one final, desperate card. Disaster is inevitable, and Logan soon learns that true redemption is often elusive.

And sometimes paid for with blood.

One phone call.

And then it’s down the rabbit hole we go...

3.) How did you feel upon publication of your first completed project?

It's what I imagine a new mother must feel like after giving birth. I cradled my Kindle in my arms as I read through my book and very nearly got weepy.

4.) What is more important to you, story, or character? Why?

Story. You need compelling characters, don't get me wrong. But then something has to happen to them. They need something to do, something to accomplish. Characterization without story is just a glorified diary.

5.) What is a typical day like in your world?

My story world? Or my personal world? Well in my story world, it's all about foiling the villain's evil plan. We don't rest until we do that. My personal world is a bit less exciting. I wake up, do my morning routine, write for 4 hours, take a three hour break, write for 4 more hours, then wind down and go to bed. I start it all over the next day. I try to take weekends off but that doesn't always happen.

Chad hates everything about life. He hates his sister for being a brat,
his parents for being in denial and pretending life is perfect, and the
world he lives in for the adherence to social pressures and norms. He
wants it all to go away.

When the zombie apocalypse wipes out the
world he’s used to, he’s left alone…and bitten. He’s sure he’ll die and
become one of the undead. Instead, he becomes severely sick and
recovers…still fully human.

Believing he can’t be the only
exception, the only one immune to the zpoc virus, Chad goes out into the
world to find others like himself. Once he does, he’s sucked into a
plan to re-civilize for the good of all the survivors.

Chad and
the other exceptions are expected to protect and provide for the weak
and vulnerable survivors. He’s not sure he wants to take on the role
expected of him in the new society, but he knows that if he refuses the
survivors will die.

The fate of the human race weighs heavily on
Chad’s young shoulders and he has to make a decision that he can live
with in the new, re-civilized world.

My
nonfiction children's article about skydiving, written for my writing
course with the Institute of Children's Literature, was published by
McGraw Hill for NY Assessments.

I'm also an editor and have
edited: Dark Dreams: Tales of Terror, Dead Worlds 7: Undead Stories, and
Book of Cannibals 2: The Hunger from Living Dead Press; Earth's End
from Wicked East Press; End of Days: An Apocalyptic Anthology (Vol. 4
& 5/co-edited) from Living Dead Press; and I've co-editing Feast or
Famine (a zombie anthology).

Sarah Doebereiner is a short story author, novelist, and poet. She graduated from Wright State University in 2010 with her BA in English. Sarah lives in central Ohio with her husband and two small children. She enjoys writing short stories including: micro-fiction, flash fiction, and novella length works. Macabre themes fascinate her because of their tendency to stay with readers long after the book has been closed, but the joy in short fiction is the opportunity to try out all kinds of genres.

A.) I didn't get serious about writing until college. I had always loved to read and write. There is this tendency when you are young to think that passion is enough to propel you forwards, but when you get a little older you see how much you need to learn before you start. In college, I poured over great works, learned craft, style, and grammar, and met professional writers who nurtured what skills I had. It was only in my third year of college that I felt my writing had evolved enough to be taken seriously, so that's when I decided to major in English / Communications.

2.) What is the hardest part for you about writing?

A.) I typically write horror, and even when I don't, there is often a darker element to my writing. I think the hardest part for me is writing when I am in a particular mood and then having to go back and edit when I am no longer in that mindset. Walking away from a manuscript can be great for perspective, but it's tough to step back into that creepy, atmospheric feeling at ten AM on a Wednesday in the hours before my day job.

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Synopsis:

They each have a secret that could destroy their relationship…

Crystal
and Sylvia are best friends, each the only one the other one trusts.
But they each have a dark secret, and neither one knows how to tell the
other. Crystal’s secret is that she’s gay and strongly attracted to
Sylvia. She wants more than friendship, but she’s afraid to destroy what
they already have by letting Sylvia know. And after all, friendship is
better than nothing, isn’t it? But Sylvia’s secret is more sinister. It
could not only destroy their friendship, it could also hurt Crystal—in
more ways than one.

3.) How did you feel upon publication of your first completed project?

A.) I should probably say something profound, but the truth is I felt very legitimized. Artist life in general can be seen as sort of whimsical or philandering. Having someone of merit look at something that I created and judge it artistically valuable is a wonderfully validating feeling.

4.) What is more important to you, story, or character? Why?

A.) That's a tricky question, but for me its the character because without a character to invest in, the story is devoid of emotional resonance. I read to feel something. I watch television to feel something. For me, it's not the situation, problems, or plot that ultimately get their hooks into me. I may not remember every twist and turn, every plot arc, or every place name. I will remember how I empathized with the character- the core of them as I perceived it.

5.) What is a typical day like in your world?

A.) I have two children so my typical day is severely lacking in the adult conversation arena. We get up. The kiddos watch cartoons with breakfast, and I either read, write or edit. Then, we play usually a mix of princess and super hero type games. After lunch, I have to head over to my day job (hopefully after a shower). Later comes dinner and a bit more playing. The kids go to bed, and I slush read, beta read, work on promotional material, or write before sleep.